Google Ads for tradies: the setup, step by step

1. Conversion tracking that counts calls and forms. Google's own setup page is the reference.[1] For a trade business the two conversions that matter are a phone call from the ad or the landing page, and a form submission. Page views are not a conversion. If your website is on a builder, the call and form goals can usually be set up through Google Tag Manager in an hour; if that sentence means nothing to you, it is the one hour of outside help worth paying for before anything else.

2. A page per job, not a homepage. Someone who searched "hot water system replacement" needs to land on a page about hot water systems with your phone number visible without scrolling. Your homepage is about you. The gap between those two is the biggest single leak in trade campaigns, and it costs nothing in media spend to fix.

3. A phone that gets answered. Ads create calls at the moment the customer has the problem. If the call rings out while you are on a roof, you paid for the click and the next listing got the job. Decide now what happens to the unanswered call, whether that is a text back within a minute, an answering service or a diverted line. The answering service cost comparison prices every option in AUD.

• Create the account at ads.google.com with the Google account that owns your Business Profile. Keep it in your own name. If anyone ever manages it for you, they get access to your account; you never run ads out of theirs.
• Google will push you towards a Smart campaign during setup. Decline it. Switch to Expert mode so every setting is visible.
• Create a campaign without a goal's guidance, then choose Search as the type. Not Performance Max yet. Search lets you choose the words, see the searches that cost you money and block the ones that do not.
• Untick the Display Network and Search partners. Both spend your budget away from the Google results page where your customer is looking.
• Name the campaign by trade and area, for example "Plumbing · Northern suburbs". You will have more than one eventually.

Location targeting is the setting with the biggest effect on cost after the keywords, and the default is wrong for a tradie.[2] Three things to change:

• Target suburbs or a radius, not the city. A capital city is 100 kilometres end to end. Enter the suburbs you genuinely drive to, or a radius around your base that matches your real call-out limit. If you quote the far side of town at a higher rate, that is a second campaign later, not this one.
• Under location options, choose Presence: people in or regularly in your targeted locations. The default includes people merely interested in the location, which is how a plumber in Perth ends up paying for a click from someone in Manila researching Perth.
• Add exclusions. The suburbs inside your radius that you will not take, and the regional centres whose names overlap with yours.

For a Perth-specific example of clustering suburbs into separate ad groups by drive time and job value, see the Perth Google Ads page. The same logic holds in any city.

An ad group is a bundle of keywords that share one ad and one landing page. The mistake is one ad group called "plumbing" with forty keywords in it. The fix is one ad group per job the customer would name, with emergency work and planned work kept apart because they are worth different amounts and need different ads.

Use phrase match (the keyword in quotes) and exact match (in square brackets). Leave broad match alone until the account has months of data; it is where most of the wasted spend in trade accounts comes from.

A negative keyword stops your ad showing for a search that contains it.[3] This is the list that saves the money. Add it at campaign level before launch, then add to it every week from the search terms report, which shows the exact phrases that triggered your ad.

Starter negatives for any trade: jobs, job, careers, apprentice, apprenticeship, salary, wage, course, courses, training, TAFE, certificate, licence check, DIY, how to, youtube, free, cheap, supplies, supplier, wholesale, Bunnings, Reece, kit, parts only, manual, review, reviews, complaint, "near me" variants for other cities you do not serve.

Per trade: plumbers add "plumbing jobs", "plumber course", toilet brands you do not stock; air conditioning adds "portable", "car air conditioning", "window unit" unless you sell them; electricians add "electrician course", "electrical engineer", "EV charger price" if you only install; roofers add "roof rack", "roofing supplies", "colorbond price per sheet"; solar adds "solar panel price", "feed-in tariff", "solar calculator" unless your page answers those.

You will still be surprised by what people type. That is the point of the weekly check.

Google builds a responsive search ad from the headlines and descriptions you supply, mixing them per search.[4] Give it enough to work with and pin the one thing that must always show.

• Headlines, at least eight: the job as the customer says it ("Blocked Drain Cleared Today"), the suburb or region, a from-price or call-out fee, "Licensed and Insured", your response time, a plain "Call Now", your business name. Pin the phone number or the job headline to position 1 so it always appears.
• Descriptions, at least three: what happens when they call, the price honesty ("$X call-out, quoted before work starts"), and one line that proves you are local.
• Call asset: your phone number as a tap-to-call button on the ad. On a phone this is the ad for most tradies.
• Location asset: link the Business Profile so the ad can show your address or service area and reviews.
• Ad schedule: match the hours the phone is answered. If nobody picks up after 6pm, do not pay for 9pm clicks. If you have a text-back or answering service, run 24/7 and bid up the after-hours emergency group, because that is where the margin is.

Published Australian figures put emergency plumbing terms at $10 to $25 a click and broader local trade terms at $5 to $12, with Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane at the top of the range.[6][7] Budget from the price you will pay, not the one you hope to.

1. Day 1: launch with the emergency group only if the budget is tight. Ring the number in your own ad from a mobile and make sure the call is recorded as a conversion.
2. Every week: open the search terms report, add negatives, and check that every conversion recorded was a real enquiry. Twenty minutes.
3. Day 14: pause any keyword that has spent more than one job's value with no conversion. Do not touch the ones with two or three clicks; they have not had a chance.
4. Day 30: judge on booked jobs, not clicks. Fewer than 30 conversions is too few to judge anything; extend rather than conclude. If conversions are there but jobs are not, the leak is after the call, and that is a phone-handling problem, not an ads problem. The missed call text back page is the fix we build for it.

The "Google Guaranteed" ads with the green tick at the top of US results are Local Services Ads, and they are not available to Australian trade businesses as at October 2026. Google is folding the format into a pay-per-lead Performance Max campaign type, starting with selected US advertisers in August 2026, broader groups in late 2026, and accounts outside the US in 2027.[5] Until then, the choices in Australia are the Search campaign above and Performance Max. Anyone selling you "Google Guaranteed" in Australia today is selling something else.

This setup takes an afternoon and works. What makes it stop working is the weekly twenty minutes. Most owner-run accounts we open were set up well and then left alone, and within a quarter the search terms report is full of searches nobody meant to buy, the ad schedule still says business hours, and the tracking broke when the website changed.

If you cannot give it twenty minutes a week, pay someone who will. Two conditions: the campaign stays in your Google Ads account so the history and the leads are yours, and the person is paid for booked jobs or a flat fee, not a percentage of what you spend. That is how we run it for Perth roofing, air conditioning and solar businesses, and the Perth page says what it costs.